In this second part of the tutorial (see the tutorial as a whole here) we will cover the steps to prepare our sketch for illustrator. This will involve inking the piece with Photoshop, correcting my fuck ups and thickening the lines for style and effect.

Okay, so when we last left off we had isolated the pencil from the blue under sketch in photoshop and made a levels correction to get ready. This next step I like to call the rasterbation before the vectorfication. Now obviously I made those two words up, but basically what I am doing is using a raster program to prepare a file for vector conversion. If you are completely new to this, I highly recommend that you educate yourself on  vector vs. raster. Click here for a fairly decent explanation.

Why vector? Well because I think it makes the picture look cleaner. I use vector for all my cartoon work even if the final is going to be a raster product.  I always use vector for the inking (see image below for an example). This is one of my personal style things. I like a clean, calligraphic look  to my cartooning. Conversion of the black to vector is a key element in that process. No other technique I know of cleans the ink up as well and keeps the organic quality of a hand drawn image. I think that Illustrator and Photoshop both have there strengths in different areas, and so I use both programs to get the look I am going for usually. Photoshop for basic inking always and sometimes shading, illustrator cleans up my mistakes.  Depending on the look I am going for I use one often more than the other, but I almost always use both. Below are some examples of my previous work demonstrating when Illustrator or Photoshop is used more heavily.

As you can see the image onthe left is fairly devoid of shading, and the one on the right has a bit of an airbrushed look. Depending on the piece one program may lend itself to the style I want more than the other. But I can’t think of a digital cartoon piece I have done where I didn’t use both. This technique has evolved over many years of trial and error and I am very happy with the process. Frankly I don’t care what you do, and besides this tutorial is all about me and feeding my ego.

As well my Print on Demand supplier has two major print processes (all print types here). The first is called flex which requires a color limited flex file and the latter is Digital Printing. Depending on the look I want for the shirt I will use on or the other. The former is generally better quality so I try and use that as much as possible, but there are color restrictions and size issues to take into account when designing for the flex process. Frankly it can be a pain the ass sometimes so I often say fuck it and use the digital print method which can reproduce any crappy drawing I come up with. The quality is pretty decent and my own personal laziness has been known to take over. At any rate these are the things I consider when developing the piece.

So back to the design process, I am aiming to create a flex style print so I will do the majority of the work in illustrator after I get the basic drawing done and cleaned up in Photoshop. When we last left off I had isolated the pencil drawing and was about to start the inking process. This is fairly straightforward in Photoshop. I simply create a new layer for the inking process and select a hard edged and pure black calligraphic brush. These are found in the brush pallet’s pop out menu. I begin tracing on my new layer inking over my under drawing.

I use a tablet to do this, and you can either splurge on a ridiculously expensive Wacom Cintiq monitor for this or by a cheaper pen tablet from them or another company. Or if you feel like torturing yourself you can attempt this with a mouse. To be honest if I could find my damn inking pens you can do this whole part on paper with pen, but I like doing it with the tablet anyways so that’s what I am going to do. You cheap bastards can do it however you want, but I’m not going to show you how in this tutorial. So I continue tracing over the under drawing, as I go I make small corrections to my original drawing. I continue until I am completed tracing the basic under drawing.

You’ll notice the corrections made to the feet. This is the beauty of drawing everything 3 times. As you go the drawing gradually improves and you never feel like you are spending a great deal of time with any one step. I find drawing monotonous so this is a good thing for me. The final step I take now is to thicken the calligraphic lines where appropriate.  To do this I eliminate the under-drawing layer from the process by creating a new layer between the ink layer and the under drawing and filling it with pure white. This just helps me see what I am doing better, and I then begin the thickening process.

Because cartoons  with solid colors have no opportunities for adding the gradations of light and shade, I use the calligraphy brush and line thickness to emphasize what should be the darker areas. Basically if it would be in shade (presuming the light source is from the high left of the page) I make that line thicker than those lines that would be in brighter lit areas. The image below shows where I am making the line under his belly almost three times as thick. This is because this area and the bottoms of his feet would be the darkest parts of the image.

So I continue this process until I complete the whole drawing. I should also point out that I made a correction here to the belly which was skewed to the right. I used the elliptical marquee tool to correct this and get a perfect oval shape for the belly.  I continue until this process is entirely complete and I have the following image as the final stage for this image in Photoshop.

And now we have an image ready for import into illustrator and vecorization of our rasterbation. Next tutorial will cover the vector conversion and the coloring, oh and we will add the pubic hair too. I’m so excited about the pubes!